This is the first entry in a series from Rich Harwood, president and Founder of The Harwood Institute. His “Enough. Time to Build.” campaign calls on community leaders and active citizens to step forward and build together.
In America today, our collective challenges are mounting. Inequities and disparities are growing, not diminishing. A lack of trust has turned into pervasive mistrust. Hope is in short supply. Meanwhile, election season rhetoric is already tearing communities apart, not building them up. And there’s a vacuum in our public square being filled by the most divisive voices.
It can feel so hard to get things done these days. Even our own allies at times create obstacles. So many of us are tired, worn down. A growing number of leaders tell me they are on the verge of giving up. In the face of all this, it’s no wonder so many community leaders have taken cover and stepped back for fear of being attacked.
The question becomes, how do we move forward together under these conditions? I believe we can only move forward by going together.
Indeed, there is a practical path forward, a way out of this mess. It’s time to call on community leaders and active citizens to declare, “Enough!” Enough hate, division and fear. Enough hopelessness. And it’s time to build together. To get moving. That’s what my new civic campaign — “Enough. Time to Build.” — is all about and it’s what we’ll be exploring in this new series here at The Fulcrum.
This campaign is moving across the country throughout 2024 and into 2025 — from California to Florida, New Mexico to Michigan, Colorado to North Carolina, and everywhere in between. Wherever we go, we’re going to highlight a new, can-do narrative from the frontlines, starting with our first event of 2024 in Flint, Mich,, on Jan. 17. Expect inspiring stories of community builders already taking action to practical steps for you to fulfill your community’s shared aspirations. We’ll also convene new virtual spaces to connect community leaders to one another and renew a sense of possibility — so no one feels that they are going it alone — alongside offering our road-tested tools for accelerating your community work.
For over 35 years, I’ve worked to transform America’s hardest hit communities. My “Turning Outward” approach to community-led, community-driven change has spread to all 50 states and 40 countries. I’ve been recruited to solve some of the most difficult problems of our time, including being called into Newtown, Conn., after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. My experience, and my reading of our country being in a truly historic moment, has convinced me that we need a distinctly civic message — not a political one — to bring us back to our shared public lives. In fact, the tens-of-thousands-strong network of community leaders we’ve built over the decades has been looking to us for this very thing.
So this election season, while I’m not running for office, I will be traveling the country to show communities a real pathway forward. Not with a utopian vision, false promises or comprehensive plans. Instead, this campaign — and the stories from communities all over this country that we’ll be telling in this new series — are meant to bring more Americans together to build. Brick by brick, neighborhood by neighborhood, community by community.
This requires that we reclaim the public square from the most divisive voices and unleash our individual and shared capacities as builders and doers. The loudest voices have a right to be heard, but they don’t have a right to dominate. We don’t need more political division and distrust, we need a civic path forward. The change people yearn for — a deeper sense of connection, belonging and dignity — is going to start in our local communities and spread from there.
I know we can create authentic hope this election season and beyond. Our five-point platform illuminates how we can begin building communities that work for all of us, not just some of us.
- The country is not where we want it to be. But we cannot wallow in despair. It’s time to build.
- There’s a vacuum in public life. The public square is dominated by the most divisive voices. It’s time for community leaders and active citizens to step forward.
- Americans are builders and doers. It’s time to unleash this capacity and go together.
- Real change always starts in local communities. Starting local is the best way to demonstrate progress and spread real change across the nation. It’s time to grow belief in one another.
- Good things are already happening in our communities. We can build on them. It’s time to accelerate and deepen these good things.
Together, we can restore our belief in one another, renew authentic hope and create the real change that our communities — and our country — so desperately need. Enough. It’s time to build.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.